MetaDAMA - Data Management in the Nordics
This is DAMA Norway's podcast to create an arena for sharing experiences within Data Management, showcase competence and level of knowledge in this field in the Nordics, get in touch with professionals, spread the word about Data Management and not least promote the profession Data Management.
-----------------------------------
Dette er DAMA Norge sin podcast for å skape en arena for deling av erfaringer med Data Management, vise frem kompetanse og kunnskapsnivå innen fagfeltet i Norden, komme i kontakt med fagpersoner, spre ordet om Data Management og ikke minst fremme profesjonen Data Management.
MetaDAMA - Data Management in the Nordics
Holiday Special: Jonathan Sunderland - Patterns of Perspicacity: Redefining Perspectives on the World of Data (Eng)
«I took the time to actually go through all of my notes, all of the training courses, all of the things that I looked at over the past 30 years of work. And I thought, I want to give myself a reference book. Wherever I go, I have this single thing that will have enough information to remind me of stuff I need to consider. This is now my book of Patterns."
Get ready to have your perspectives on data management revolutionized! This Holiday special serves up a treasure trove of insights, as we dive deep into the interconnections of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. We'll be shining light on the importance of quality data and the emerging role of data officers in organizations, challenge conventional thinking about systemic behavior changes and their impact on data management, while also stressing the utmost necessity of experimentation and testing to comprehend the ever-changing data patterns.
I was lucky to pick the brain of the experienced data expert Jonathan Sunderland, whose career has spanned an array of industries and roles. The conversation is a call to arms for organizations to have clear purposes and goals when striving to become "data-driven." Plus, you'll get an exclusive peek into our guest's impressive "book of patterns" project, which promises to be an invaluable reference for future endeavors.
This is a thought-provoking exploration of the fine balance that large organizations need to strike between agility and long-term goals. We'll confront the dangers of resistance to change and the pitfalls of a myopic focus on quick wins, offering insights on how to foster a culture of innovation without falling into the trap of over-optimization or outsourcing purely for cost reduction. Moreover, we'll dive into the world of data governance, discussing its crucial role in fostering trust with data and facilitating informed decision-making. Finally, we distill the essence of personal growth into three potent rules of challenge, enable, and inspire. So, what's your capacity? How can you elevate it to tap into your fullest potential? This episode inspires to ponder these questions and propel your personal and professional growth.
Happy Holidays!
IT vs. data.
Jonathan Sunderland:Yeah, that's an interesting thing.
Winfried Etzel:Why should we have an own? Why can't we just have an IT department and then do all that data stuff?
Jonathan Sunderland:Maybe when was it? 25 years ago? I remember working somewhere and one of the senior people's basically described it's not a pyramid, it's a triangle, right? Data, information, knowledge, wisdom, right? So you start at the bottom of data, then you've got information, then you have, so knowledge comes from that information and wisdom is looking at it. So, if you think about it, data might be the customer transaction, right. Might be a single record of a customer buying a product. Information might be the number of transactions per day. Knowledge might be how those transactions, the number of transactions per day, is changing. And wisdom might be why is that happening, right? Why is it happening? Oh, we're seeing more sales on a Saturday. Why is that? Well, people have chance to get more time because they're not working right to do this thing.
Jonathan Sunderland:So that pyramid is really interesting when you think about how organizations are typically structured that you have a CTO, a Chief Technology Officer and a Chief Information Officer, and even a Chief Finance Officer, right. And then we have the role of a CTO, right? Well, how? If information is built on data, then why do we suddenly need a data officer, right? Some of those things are kind of weird. I think about it. Well, would a bakery, have a chief flower officer, right, and a lot of that is. I think, to some extent, the emergence of people actively thinking about data is like an immune response thing, right, you know, when you get a cut or a scar, all the white blood cells go to that area to heal it, right? And I think that to some extent, organizations are excused this simplistic term but kind of living entities, right, and they need. They have systems within them to defend their viability and the way that decisions are made depends upon having good quality data, and so having, you know, having defense mechanisms around ensuring data quality is good, is important.
Jonathan Sunderland:I think the challenges are where you know, if you think about a business that delivers services, right, and you know, like a bank, right, so a bank delivers services it could operate without any computers. In fact, if you think about it, they probably did 70 years ago. Banks didn't have computers because computers didn't exist, right, you had lots of people doing things, tabulating. You had, maybe, mechanical computers. You'd have armies of people typing numbers in and into those machines and doing that activity, and you know, maintaining ledgers and copying.
Jonathan Sunderland:So we have had situations within you know, some people's living memory, where computers weren't part of how organizations worked, and now they're an integral part of that, and so I think it is interesting how we have become focused on data in and of itself rather than thinking about the system and purpose for it, because there's data required to record an event, a transaction. You know, from an audit point of view, you know, if I'm gonna deposit money into a bank, right, I want the bank to know that I've deposited that money in, right, and I want to. You know, I want recording of that and I want them to go. Yeah, you probably put a hundred euros in, maybe it was 19, maybe it was 110. Yeah, something about that. And you probably did it last week, right, that precision is really important. You need to know that it was 97 euros and 56 cents posted in on the 12th of August, right At 322 pm, right, that's important, right, and so having that system of record is kind of an important aspect there, anyway. So that framework of thinking about data, information, knowledge, wisdom, I think becomes important when things start to change, and I would say that we're living in really interesting times where generally, systemic behavior is not acting the way that it was right.
Jonathan Sunderland:We're seeing that, for example, the effects of global warming changing the way that weather patterns happen, and that changes the way that, for example, insurance payouts work right. We're seeing this in the UK I don't know what is in most of Europe where premiums are going up because claims costs are going up. And claims costs are going up because we're getting lots more unpredictable events. Hot summers mean the ground dry out and you get subsidence on buildings, and then that causes claims that are far in excess of what you'd normally have.
Jonathan Sunderland:Excessive floods cause damage. They don't cause damage to buildings. They mean the cars get damaged, roads get damaged. We're seeing the increase in electrical vehicles, where electrical vehicles are considerably heavier than internal combustion engine vehicles, and if the road structure is not set up to support that, you get breakdown in road structures, which then causes damage to vehicles. Right Potholes cause tire damage and suspension damage, which then causes other costs, and so you get these new perils that you hadn't really considered before and systems become non-linear right. And so I think a lot of this, a lot of the need for data, is to support existing processes and systems, but also to recognize when change is happening, and that is really why kind of knowledge and wisdom is important, and you don't really know why things are happening, unless you can experiment and test that.
Winfried Etzel:Interesting, I like your tongue right into it. Yeah, sorry, like bam.
Winfried Etzel:This is Metadema, a holistic view on data management in the Nordics. Welcome, my name is Winfried and thanks for joining me for this episode of Metadema. Our vision is to promote data management as a profession in the Nordics. Show the competencies that we have and that is the reason I invite Nordic experts in data and information management for talk.
Winfried Etzel:Welcome to Metadema. And this is kind of a special episode because we're going a bit out of the Nordics, but for really good reasons, because we asked Jonathan Shunderland with us today. Hey, jonathan.
Jonathan Sunderland:Hi Winfried, how are you doing Nice? It's lovely to be here. I'm sorry if I just dive straight in. We'll probably have to edit that around a bit or something.
Winfried Etzel:I think that's funny. I like it. I'm here for a special episode and I'd make it special. I still want to get a bit of a hold up who Jonathan is before we deep dive into it. So if you want to introduce yourself, talk a bit about your job, but also your hobbies, and maybe you're interested for data.
Jonathan Sunderland:Okay, yeah, so I'm Jonathan. I live in the UK, I do a fair bit of traveling. I've been working with data for well, okay, so let's just back up. So I've been working with computers since the 1970s. I've been paid to work with them since the 1990s. Oh, I'm sure that's not true, because my first job out of university was 1989. I dropped out of university, I studied physics and computer science. I dropped out after a couple of years and then got a job working for a company that made mass spectrometers, so kind of lab equipment.
Jonathan Sunderland:I remember coming to work one day I was aged about 21, and the HR lady called me into my boss's office and said hey, jonathan, the company's been taken over. You don't have a job. Here's a check, goodbye. And it was like what do you mean? Like I had an hour and a half's notice to get out of the building and I was 21. And it was the first thing I said was well, I need to finish the lab equipment, I need to finish that. And said it's not your problem anymore. And I was really distraught because I wanted to finish the job I was doing, because to me that was that sense of pride of the thing. I work on it. It's something that's always really important to me and I remember them saying and this sounded a bit disingenuous at the time it said we had to choose people to go and we know that you will be successful and that's why we got rid of you. And I was like, well, when you're 21, that's a bit of a weird statement, right, and but actually it was probably one of the best things that happened to me.
Jonathan Sunderland:I was actually fortunate that my parents were, I was living at home, so I didn't have a mortgage at that time and I was only 21, right, and I didn't really have no cares in the world, really. You know, I sent out, I wrote up my CV, I sent it out to a few companies and I got another job and this. What was weird is that I wrote up my CV on a typewriter. I remember going out and buying special heavy paper all right, I wish I kept a copy of this and typing up my CV and then having it photocopied, going to the local library, but they had a photocopier where you just put 10p in to actually get the copies done, putting in my special paper and getting the copies done right, and doing that. This wasn't, you know, even on a computer and doing work processing and then printing it out and then emailing it. It was literally. And so I really thought about I want to make a really good impression by having really high quality paper right. That was a thing. Even then I was kind of thinking about some of the details and so when I applied for a number of jobs, I was very, very, very fortunate.
Jonathan Sunderland:I got a job at what was ICL, which then became Fujitsu, and I started out doing mainframe support.
Jonathan Sunderland:But I've written down some notes in front of me, things to talk about.
Jonathan Sunderland:And I did mainframe support and I remember this is another important thing for me, this was really early, it's supposed to be about 1990, or something and I remember being my pager Remember those pages right, there was a little thing that you'd have in your belt and it would beep right my pager going off at about two or three o'clock in the morning because some kind of batch processing had failed, having to drive into work, so like a 30 mile drive to come into work and then to deal with this, you know, failed mainframe COBOL processing and trying to fix it.
Jonathan Sunderland:And I remember then doing and making a vow to myself that I would never write an application that would mean that somebody else would have to come out at night to support it, right, that was that was a really important thing to me. And I think about principles, right, that is kind of my moral framework about how I do things, right, and you know, and so part of my self motivation is it's not that I don't want to support things, I don't want to need to support them, right, I don't want you know that I really value that creative process of trying to understand the world and understand the universe and our place net. And how can you do that if you're worried about details all the time? Right, details are important between them.
Winfried Etzel:Really good because we called the episode the patterns of purpose. Actually, just tell me what. What was the reason for? Oh yeah, yeah, so.
Jonathan Sunderland:So if I wind forward right, so I've you've started really detailed at the beginning anyway. So I worked there. I then, you know, 10 years later I ended up at a startup and basically it burned through all of its funding and I was left as the last person in Europe and you know I'd failed to pay my mortgage a couple of times at a wife and kids and it was quite stressful. And then I managed to get a job with another startup that was successful and we grew from. You know, I was employed at number 10 or something we grew to be ultimately be a division of experience of about 500 people. I was there for eight years building out architecture and pros and capability, and it was there that I first encountered Abinish, which I'll talk a little bit about, but you know, not too much I was there. I moved on to Sony. I was there at Sony for six years building out data processing and then the establishment of data science function. I then, of course, the obvious thing to do, you know, having had a PlayStation on my desk and be able to play games and generate data. So that was an important thing, that feedback loop of I know that I played this game. What did the data tell me? That was really important to then understand that, be able to see that that data and get that feedback loop.
Jonathan Sunderland:I then joined an insurance company. So I went from a completely different industry of acts. Part of that is I really wanted to test myself Right, I really wanted it. And so I went to a company I didn't know, in an industry I didn't know, in a location I didn't know, with people I didn't know. I had no budget, no team, no data, no software, no hardware, no sponsors is literally everything Right. There was not one, you know, I had to pay right, but at a key thing of make us better with data. But it was literally a complete blank sheet of paper. So I had to what we call Greenfield Right. Yeah, it was. It was even more than that right and it was a really interesting experience of in many, many ways. So I was there for three years. I established a data science function and that data science function eventually became effective in new brand for insurance, doing pricing in a different way.
Jonathan Sunderland:I left there and I had some time off between when I left there to start my next role and I realized that I had two challenges. One challenge was I needed to find another job, right. And the second challenge was how was I going to be successful in that job? And so I was fortunate I had some time, I didn't need to rush into things, and so I took the time to actually go through all of my notes, all of the training courses, all of the things that I looked at over the past sort of 30 years of work, and I thought I want to give myself a reference book. You know that wherever I go, I've got this single thing that will have enough information to remind me of stuff that I need to consider, right. And so this is now my book of patterns, right? You know, think about it's.
Jonathan Sunderland:You know, I would say it's probably one of you know, outside of my family is probably my most treasured possession, because it's it's distilled everything that I've learned into one of the most important things. One thing and this is it right, and you can see, it's a bit of a scrappy book with notes and pages, and in fact, if I even show you here, it's kind of falling apart a bit because it's it's been, and what I tried to do is is, you know, do a page on one side of a thing and then maybe some notes on the other side, with the intent at some point I might write it up into a you know some other book that others can use. It actually is probably going to be the gift to my children, right, because it's, you know, everything I've learned on to pass into them and actually I want to pass it on to somebody else. Most of the things in here are things I've learned from others and I've. You know, it's not original thought. Maybe the original thought is pulling it together and curating it and I call it my, my patterns for purse passacity, right, and the the reason for doing that.
Jonathan Sunderland:Purse passacity is a really lovely word and I think it actually is the best word to describe data science.
Jonathan Sunderland:The purse passacity is around a clarity of understanding, right, and interestingly, when, when NASA were recruiting astronauts for the Apollo program or the Mercury and then the Apollo program, they looked for, it wasn't just you know, can you get some kind of you know, fighter pilot or test pilot, right?
Jonathan Sunderland:Is their ability to really think critically in a tricky situation, to understand exactly what's going on and act upon that and have clarity of vision and purpose and understanding in that moment. So that's that's to me is what purse passacity is actually the definition of what data science should be, and maybe there's a different thing on there. So, in order to understand the complex world, you need to apply lenses and filters to remove complexity, right, and to say what can I, what can I not worry about, right, I may have to come back and understand it, but what can I? Move out of the way. So I'm just left with the novel thing to understand, right, and that's that's the how I treat. It is a list of things that, if I encounter a problem, what does that look like? And therefore, what's my best mode of operation for going to that Fantastic?
Winfried Etzel:So we jump right into it? I think we should. Yeah, one of the questions I had when I first heard you talk is are we and don't take this as criticism, but I'm just are we, are we going to a high level here? Or have we never asked why? Because this is kind of the thing we are in right now in many companies that you, you see a new patterns emerging in the industry, called a data mesh or it's called a generative AI, and people jump right on it and they never ask why. Why would we do that? In our editing? They just say, oh, this is the good thing that's gonna make us all better. But in what way? And I've even seen that in most companies, when you talk about that that's become data driven, why they're driven Well, I so I find that.
Jonathan Sunderland:So this is a great topic, right. So this is a philosophical thing and I think it's really important we we take the time to do philosophy right, because it's about understanding and having a real purpose. And I find the thing I struggle with is organization. So we want to be data driven, but you know you've already got a finance department, you're already making decisions on where you want to make your investments and how the business work, so that you're already using data. What I don't understand, what that means it might be. We want to make better decisions. We want to understand how we can be more efficient as an organization want us to, how we can do grow. So I think the notion of this binary state we're going to be in the cloud, we want to be agile, we want to be data driven. It's this binary condition which is kind of weird as a data person talking about binary right, but it's much better to say what is it that I'm not good at? How can I be better at that thing? What do we want to do more of? You know what we do want to do less of right, and how would you know that you're data driven?
Jonathan Sunderland:I once went for an interview. You know, as I've. You know I talk about this. I went for an interview with an airline and I remember sitting down that you know we're looking for a chief data scientist and I was talking to whoever was recruiting a person there and said our CEO has a vision for us to be the most data driven airline in the world. And I said, well, how would you know that? And he would you mean, simple, how would you know you're the most data driven airline? Because you'd have to talk to all the other airlines and have some quantitative way of identifying that right? That's a weird statement. Right, to say that you want to be the most, the most data driven. What you need to say is we, we need to. You know, our business strategy is to do these things and therefore we want to understand how we could be most effective and delivering our business strategy and and having, you know, great experience for our customers and and delivering value to a shareholder this right and to have a sustainable, viable business right that's what organizations want. So I think that's why I really struggle with this chasing after roles or bandwagon's or we've got to be data driven, or we can have a CDO and you know those kind of things because it's not thinking about why do we want to do that stuff?
Jonathan Sunderland:And if you want to, you know a lot of this actually comes down to culture change. Right, talk to earlier on about the immune response system of we need to. We need to embed new patterns of behavior in the organization, new processes you standard, new protocols, or why? Why don't people measure data quality? Right, but you don't measure data quality because you haven't felt the need to, because it's not important in the way about decisions, right if you're. If, for example, your Toyota building cars, right, having really good quality products, and if you're getting a supplier to deliver you doors or windows, right, they've got to be within that manufacturing tolerance. If they're not, you can't just, oh, just hammer it in on every one Because, guess what? That's what happened to British Leyland in the 1970s and that's why UK doesn't have a motor industry anymore. Really, it's because of quality and manufacturing tolerance. There's always kind of things.
Jonathan Sunderland:So if you, the question is not we want to be data driven. It's why do you feel you haven't needed to be data driven for so long? Because how can a business exist without data right, knowing should I hire this person or not? Should I? When should we go on holiday? What bonuses do we give to people? What product should we give to customers? These are all data driven decisions. So I find that question right. It's a very long and rambling answer to your very simple question. I find it a very hard question.
Winfried Etzel:It is a really hard question and I think there is a certain beauty to startup companies where the purpose is so clearly defined. This is the problem we intend to solve for the world, and if you go into large operations, like large enterprises and companies that have been there for years, it comes out of focus and the purpose becomes something else like, oh, let's create stakeholder value, but is that really the purpose of the company to create stakeholder value or is it to solve the problem?
Jonathan Sunderland:Yeah, so I think that there's. I'm going to go back to organization agility for a moment, because I think that's an area that I've been really, really passionate about of my career. So I spent probably the first 10 years of my IT career right, doing being a developer, being an architect, coming up with solutions, doing a bit of pre-sales work. I work for big companies, small companies, I work for organizations that have failed. Right, that's an important thing. You know going, you know working for startup but didn't, and you're learning the lessons from that activity, and the thing that's apparent to me is that you can only be truly agile if you fear for your survival. Right, it's about adaptation. What do you need to do to adapt, to survive? And on a personal level, right, having being made redundant and seeing that redundancy happen to other people as well, what I realized is that I want to take control of my life and my destiny to the best I can, right, and part of that is I want to get ahead of adaption curves, right, and I, you know I love the UDA model observe, orientate, decide and act. You know John Boyd's model around agility and thinking about your ability to adapt and change in there, and so to me, data is a key part of understanding agility. And when we talk about large companies and small companies, actually I enjoy working in small companies because that thrill you don't know what you do each day, that you're fighting for your survival. Maybe I'm just drawn to those kind of you know, edge of chaos kind of things.
Jonathan Sunderland:When you're in a big company, what's kind of interesting is actually people don't really need to do anything. They have the illusion of work right, well, we could do this thing. We don't. You know we didn't make this decision. You know it rolls on for another week. We didn't make this decision. The business still works. Right, you still got customers. You know when you've got, when you're a sufficient size. You know when you've got millions, tens, even hundreds of millions of customers.
Jonathan Sunderland:You know, as global organizations maybe and I'm very fortunate to encounter those is that you have a very different pattern of behavior. Right, you have the emergence of what I call a vetocracy, or others have come in that phrase of it's easy to say no because everything's working right. So why will we change anything? Right, so the change, you know when you're, when you're kind of as I brought in blank sheet of paper we want to do stuff with data. Well, no, actually it's about agility and making different decisions and using data to work in a different way. You know you can't say we want to be different but we want to stay exactly the same right. That doesn't work.
Jonathan Sunderland:So you've got to have that purpose and if you don't have that, you know fear for your survival. Then that that's kind of a that's a really strong purpose. And when you come back to that startup thing about why startups are great, is that they've got a clear purpose right One. They've got a vision. They're going to implement some new product or service. They're going to change the world. They're going to, you know, do something amazing where it's a very clear purpose and you're building that, you're going forward with that. And some, you know it's even better when there's a reward at the end of that. But sometimes just even the notion of doing something profound and different is is really good right. And I would say that you know some of. When I look back, you know some of those those really amazing moments in my career happened when there were times were really difficult when you kind of thought, well, we've got to you know, got to do something to keep us ticking over, keep up.
Jonathan Sunderland:You know the revenue coming in, right, you really think about what's important. I think the other aspect of this which is worth dwelling on is about capacity, because when you're, when you've got kind of a business that's that's running really efficiently, how do you add value? Right, there's only two ways you can add value increase sales or reduce costs. So if you're, let's say, you're in a bank, you're the manager responsible for business intelligence, right, you've got a team of people. How are you going to add more value year on year? How do you add 5, 10% value to the business, right? Well, the only. You're not going to increase sales, right, because you're doing business intelligence, you're just saying how many customers we've got or what you know what KPIs this department's doing. So there's only one way that you can add value and that's by reducing costs. So how do you reduce costs? Well, you might go with a lower cost team, right? You might say, well, my FT cost in my team is this amount. I'm now going to outsource that to somebody else, right? And I'm now get rid of all my team and have a few business analysts and project managers, and then I go, well, we need to reduce that cost even further. We might offshore that work, right. So you, you start looking at that activity, but what you're not then considering is your ability to react, the ability to change the intuition that comes with people who are close.
Jonathan Sunderland:Now, where does innovation come from? It comes from you know. You can't. You know, I can't say, winfred, be innovative right now. Right, doesn't happen that way. It happens by random encounters, right, and if you over optimize a business, you actually remove capacity to innovate, and that's a really important. That's why startups are so great is because you have people just bumping into each other all the time. You get these collisions. It's like, you know, it's like a mixture of gas and a jar that is just colliding, right, and and you suddenly get these, these interactions, and you go well, that's a great idea, we can do something with that. Right, you, you know.
Jonathan Sunderland:And when you, when you strip capacity from an organization in the hope of getting value, you're stripping your ability to innovate. Right, and then, as soon as you, you say, well, we need to come up with some ideas. We, we don't, I can't take anybody off their, off their day job because they're doing too important stuff. Right, they can't innovate, so we'll we'll get somebody else in to innovate for us. We'll get somebody in. Well, how does that organization then justify their expensive consultants? Right, they do that by saying we're going to get some quick wins. And what quick wins do is they? They actually perpetuate the short termism. Right, quick wins is not a strategy, right, it's a short term tactic for delivering quick value, if you excuse the the slight, maybe British indulgence on this.
Jonathan Sunderland:So one of the sports I like to watch and occasionally play is is pool or snooker.
Jonathan Sunderland:Right, you know, and one of the things about snooker or pool is that you know you've got to, you've got a cue ball and you've got to hit an object ball and you've got to put it in the pocket and you've got to put a number of those in succession.
Jonathan Sunderland:Well, if you only play the easy shot where your ball is over the pocket, it becomes harder and harder to play the other shots. Right, you've got to think about the big picture, that what you're trying to do is to win the frame, to win a number of games, to win the match, the tournament, and you do that by stopping your opponent and by winning more right. And so you have to do the hard shots, you have to understand how you might play one shot to open up another one. They've got to think strategically, like playing chess right, the easy thing, and play chess is we'll just take that piece. But if you can't think three, four, five, six, ten moves ahead, right, then you're just going to lose. So business cannot be just short term right, it has to have long term things on there. And that's what capacity gives you. Capacity gives you the ability to deal with the unexpected, to innovate and to be strategic.
Winfried Etzel:That's excellent. I've got two things I want to dig into now because, well, some people that might be a contradiction. Right, you say well, I have to be truly agile, I have to adapt and change fast, but at the same time, you want to focus on long term value. That could be seen as a contradiction, because if you change fast, if you iterate fast, how can you keep the long term goal at?
Jonathan Sunderland:night. That's a really good question. I hadn't really thought about that and you flawed me. I think it's about what it is that you're doing in the short term that helps you in the long term, right? So if I go back to that notion of playing snooker that you have to think it's about heuristics, right, I need to do something right now. How does that help me in my long term goal? People have choices, right, and the value of having capacity is it increases the number of choices that you have and therefore opens up your opportunities to achieve your long term goal, right. And so how can you adapt if you haven't tried different things, right? And so, true, agility is actually the iterative you shouldn't get focused on. We've got to do scrum, we've got to do iterations, we've got to have standups and we're going to use a Kanban and we're going to use this because, yeah, that's agile with a capital. A agile with a little A is about rate of adaptation, right, and how you simplify things, not over-measure everything of what is it what fails, what you need to do better. And so I think being really clear about the long-term goals is important, and if you think about just if you're going to plan, to go on a journey or to go from London to Glasgow.
Jonathan Sunderland:I have choices to do that. Want to get there quickly. Do want to get there the most economically. Do want the most scenic route. Do want a route that takes me past really nice restaurants. Do want to have a route that goes by the sea. Do want a route that avoids toll roads, one that I must use public transport as much as possible. These are all heuristics for how I solve that problem. Right, a no point. If I say I'm going to get a ticket for this airline and I'm going to do this, you know there's lots of logic. It might be I don't even need to go there because I can just do this and have a WebEx or a Zoom call or something with someone. So, being clear about the big picture, but then having a look at the options, it might be okay. I'm going to drive because I want to have an enjoyable journey, so I set off and then there's a traffic jam so I might route around somewhere else and I've run out of fuel or I need to go and fill up, and well, maybe I can do something else while I'm doing that activity. So we're constantly doing that adaptation in our lives and we're constantly using data to change that. You know, having feedback to say, hey, this road is closed or there's going to be roadworks on here or it's going to be busy at this time, means that you change how you plan when I go into work.
Jonathan Sunderland:I get into work really early, like I leave the house at five o'clock in the morning because I hate being stuck on the motorway, right? So I do that and I look to go, and when I leave in the evening I think, well, there's no point me leaving at five o'clock or six o'clock at work because I'm going to be stuck on the motorway for two hours because of how bad the traffic is. So I'll just work through to seven so that I think it takes me an hour to get home. That gives me time to do other things, right? Question about short-term, long-term right.
Jonathan Sunderland:What is your value and what am I going to do in that hour and a half that I'm sat in the office, right? Do I do more coding or do I do more reading? Do I do explore? Do I think about or just? You know, I've got colleagues in the US. I'll have a chat with them because I do that anyway. I think it's about how you maximise the value of the time you've got. That's an important thing right In the you know, we don't know how long we've got. How do we maximise the value of that time?
Winfried Etzel:There's a second part of my question here, and this I mean data governance background. So you have kind of the long-term focus in data governance setting. But how do you actually do data governance? And several approaches to this. One of the most popular ones is to do it iteratively. Have great returns of investment on the way right. You show your value by doing quick wins, but for long-term, for a long-term goal, right?
Jonathan Sunderland:Yep, okay, data governance, I think, is about trust. Okay, do I trust the data to use it for the purpose that I want to use it for? And do I trust this person to use that data for the purpose they say they're going to use it for? And do our customers trust us as an organisation to look after their precious asset, their data? Right, they're going to give us data to do things they may. They may not know that they're giving us data. Right, their clickstream is, you know, maybe part of you know that's the data of our activity. Data reveals things. It reveals things about us. It reveals things that we might not even know about ourselves yet. Right, it reveals, you know, to some extent, data. Data is a language for behaviour, and behaviour is the manifestation of our values and our beliefs. Right, the things that we need to do. I think about culture in that way that values, beliefs, behaviour and language all come together, and so one of the challenges that organisations have is that data is often used now for purposes for which it was never intended. Okay, so we capture data. We capture transaction data of. You know, jonathan bought this product on this day at this time. Right, because we have to record that. Because Jonathan gave us money for that product, we had to ship it to them. Oh, we didn't ship it. Jonathan has chased up our operations department. Go, why don't you do that? So we keep that information to support elements of the services. Right, so organisations have products, they deliver services, and the role of management is to keep that working effectively. So we make decisions in the moment using data.
Jonathan Sunderland:Okay, and we might capture that data to measure the performance of the business. And it's when the performance of the business starts to deviate from what we expect or desire, right. So we say our shareholders demand a 10% increase in value. Right, they want more return on their investment or else they're going to take their investment somewhere else because they have a choice. Right. So an organisation said well, how do we increase our sales? Right, do we increase our sales by finding more customers? Well, who are the customers, like Jonathan or Winfred, that did this particular thing? How might we make our products or services more attractive to them? Right, so you might start to use the data in that way. It might be.
Jonathan Sunderland:You say, well, it looks like people are abandoning their checkouts because the way that they make transactions is too hard. So we need to make that easier. So we need to experiment, we need to give a different front end. We might want to use a different pavements mechanism. We might want to find different ways of doing that. That's why you use data in those purposes.
Jonathan Sunderland:You know, when you have an idea or a hypothesis or something you want to test. You know making change, particularly in a heavily regulated industry like a finance one, is really difficult, right, you're really certain you can do these things. Experimentation is an anathema, really. So you want as much data as possible to justify your decision, right? And you know, I've seen that way off of them where someone says I want you to do analysis that shows this, right, well, that's not analysis, that's just data drift. It's great. It's not experimentation of, oh, you know, what should we do? How might we increase customer stickiness? How might we increase sales conversion rates? Right, you know all of those, those simple things that you're trying to do.
Jonathan Sunderland:And so you'll come back to your question about data governance. Right, governance is are the right people using the data for the right purposes? Do they get the best value out of that, right? So what assumptions are they making about the quality of data that helps them make their decisions. So this comes back to the. You shouldn't be data driven. You should be more trusting of the data that you use. Right, this is. It should be easier for you to make decisions, better value decisions.
Jonathan Sunderland:Right, if we think about those kind of words that describe it, then saying you know, I think there's been this obsession of going. Well, that company over there made lots of money and they said they're data driven. Therefore we must be data driven and we're going to make lots of money. No, that's that's kind of the cargo cult mentality. Right, you have to say what is it that we're not very good at that we can be better at? And what do we need to do to support that process? And if that means better data, that's important. If it needs better data quality, right, I'm like you know.
Jonathan Sunderland:I come back to my. I love my analogies. Right, you know what's this. Right, you don't know what that is. Right, we load to tin of something. It's only when I put the label on it that we now know that it's a tin of peaches. Right, and it actually tells me some real data. It tells me the sugar and the and the fat content and the nutrition? Right, it tells me who produced this and when it was created. It gives me a recipe you know serving suggestions for it. It gives me a weight that allows me to trust this. Right, I don't trust this because I don't know what it is and data's like that that you need.
Jonathan Sunderland:You need the supporting information, and that's really what data governance is about. It's helping people trust data to make better decisions with it, and that actually is around having metadata, right. So metadata is data about data. Right, it's a highly recursive thing, right? So it's saying what information have we got that describes this, that aggregates the information inside this tin into a way that's useful for people, right? What is the nutritional content? Well, you could actually list out the chemical symbols for the materials on here, but unless you're educated to a level that knows how to interpret those chemical symbols, it's no use. So you need to distill it into things that everybody can understand, right? We need to know the carbohydrates, we need to know the calories, we need to know the sugar. You know those kind of things, right? We need to know how much is liquid or solid or whatever. Right, so that then helps people understand.
Jonathan Sunderland:Oh, I wanted this or that, right, I actually meant to buy peach slices. I got peach halves, right? Well, it doesn't actually matter because I can take them and cut them up, right. So having data governance is being able to deliver that trust in a consistent way. So I take a trust framework across the organization to make that better.
Jonathan Sunderland:And so the challenge, if you think about having these vast volumes of data that was collected for a purpose that wasn't intended, and then you've got people who are using it, who are under pressure to deliver value quickly, you then got potentially no pun intended recipe for disaster, and so that actually means that what was it? Well, I don't trust these data scientists. They didn't, I didn't understand, they didn't do the right thing and so you could have trust. Trust is a really important thing, and that's ultimately what the role of data strategy be around is increasing trust. In fact, you you know, if I think about this now, that that actually there shouldn't be a chief data officer. There should be a focus on, either, the most curious person, which is driving curiosity in terms of creativity, but there should also be, you know, the most trustful person, right, shaping, shaping trust on there. And let me, let me just go. So many analogy, so many things flying off.
Jonathan Sunderland:I remember having this conversation when I was recruiting my new data science team. When I was at the insurance company and I went to the head of recruitment I said I want to hire people that do extreme sports and they were like what are you all about? I said I would hire those people because they are intrinsically safe, right? Someone that does free climbing or, you know, parascending or whatever right they they are. You might think that that's a dangerous sport, but actually being aware of danger all the time means you're intrinsically safe. So that means that you're you're mindful around.
Jonathan Sunderland:What am I doing with this thing? If I'm using some data, it might well. I think we should think about data as a radioactive material. It's going to have half life, it's going to spread, it's going to infect the organization in both a good and a bad way, and we should assume the worst right and expect the best right. So having people that have an appreciation for safety that's an intrinsic part that you know come back to those values that they value. Safety more than anything else is really important.
Winfried Etzel:There's a fantastic way of tying the loose ends together from the conversation. I really liked that Because we went back to the CDO role, but you also tied together two things that I think are really important trust and literacy. So there are two sides to data governance. Right, there's the one side that providing the right information to the right people at the right time, building the trust but on the other side there's also do those people actually understand what I'm providing them? And if you want to do it at easy ontology, you can. You don't think of a dashboard, right? Can I actually read the information on the dashboard? And if I put all the positive numbers in red and all the negative numbers in green, what will happen?
Jonathan Sunderland:then. Well, I've seen that the insurance company I worked at, its brand was a red telephone. So they use red everywhere, right, and they didn't use red when it was an emergency, because the original purpose of the red telephone is like this is the phone, the telephone the president will use when he's going to call. Remember the original 1960s Batman program? But when Commissioner Gordon wanted to talk to Batman he'd have a red telephone on his desk and they call that, right. So there was always this notion that the red telephone is the hotline in an emergency and direct line groups use the right. From then it's formed like in 1985, one of those was the red telephone, right, it was there as the emergency the person you call because the band was there. But they took that to. Well, just, you read everywhere. So you had normal presentation decks where you'd have red just randomly thrown in, it's like, not because it was a warning and you need to focus on it, they're using it because it was a brand color.
Jonathan Sunderland:It's a terrible choice as a brand color because and I love this is why I might talk about irony a lot that the purpose and meaning of have diverged so greatly, and that's why that actually is a really interesting point, right. But when you talk about literacy, there's lots of choices of different technologies and tools, and so there's a massive dilution of capability across organizations, right, and there's a focus on oh, should I learn SQL, should I learn Python, should I learn XYZ tool? So the number one thing is critical thinking. If you don't start with critical thinking, people won't question of am I doing the right thing, how do I do that better? The other thing is how do you keep it as simple as possible and not any simpler, right? It's the Einstein thing, right, and so actually, that's part of the role of I like the term the benevolent dictator. I'm going to take away your choice, I'm going to make it as easy as possible, for do this one thing Now.
Jonathan Sunderland:Interestingly, sql was developed as a language for non-technical people in the 1970s to be able to query databases and ask business questions, and yet now SQL is seen as a really technical thing, right? So does that mean that people have just got dumber, the organization got dumber, how Well? I don't believe that. So there's not enough time for us to discuss this and there's a whole separate point. But I think that is a really strange thing, that, in the ability to do so much. We've lost sight of the ability to just do simple things really, really well. And so I think the part of the role of CDO is to create a single language for data across the organization. Right, to make it so that people understand. Right, a common ontology that describes I'll go back to my this is an organization work.
Jonathan Sunderland:They had at least three different definitions of employee. What is it? How many employees have we got? Well, finance would say it's a number of people we pay salary to. Hr would say how many people are on a particular system. It would say how many accounts they've got, and facilities would say how many desks they need to provide. Right, so you, they'd all have this number. They go into a meeting and they'd all be disagreeing over it. Right, they'd be disagreeing at those levels.
Jonathan Sunderland:So you have to get those fundamentals right, and that means a subtlety of language, that means you're going to be clear about those things and be really precise at the detail. And if you're, if you're allowing, oh well, we can use Java and R and C and Python and SQL and Rust and Go, and you know we're using, you know, google and AWS. If you just give so many choices to people, because you think choices about enabling what it actually does is. It doesn't enable you to innovate right.
Jonathan Sunderland:Innovation, from my experience, comes from starvation. Innovation comes from a need of focus, and so if I've only got this, what can I do? So abundance is the enemy of innovation right, abundance is the, you know, is the enemy. So when you think about the role of a CDO and strategy, you're thinking about how do you, how do you provide clarity, how do you enable people to have a common language so that they can trust each other and that they can execute quickly and understand whether those new activities are are driving real, profound value in a, in a, in a correct and effective way?
Winfried Etzel:Thank you so much. We're already at the end of it. Where's it called? Things like we need to have a follow up on this one, I think. But you, you really do it and tying it up together at the end here. But before I let you go, do you have any call to actions to people or a key takeaway you want people to to bring?
Jonathan Sunderland:Well, I, I would say okay. So I, I live by my life. I live by three rules of challenge enable, inspire right. So challenge to make things better, enable to make things happen and inspire the model way and my, because it's a nice, simple way of working. I believe that you should only do two of those things at most, right? So if you are challenged, my job is to enable and inspire you. If you're enabled, my job is to challenge and inspire you. And if you're inspired, my job is to challenge and enable. We can pay.
Jonathan Sunderland:So I'd like people to think about what they do to themselves right, because you can apply to yourself, your team, your company, your world right, and that that's a really important thing. And so my challenge to people is to think about their capacity. How do you increase your capacity to do more, right? How do you increase your capacity to that, so you don't have to worry about the detail, right? If I go back to that whole thing of why you know my, my, you know I've been called out at two o'clock in the morning to support somebody else's application. How I vowed never to do that. Part of that is how do I increase my capacity so that I can focus on the things that I love to do right and be creative and innovate. That's what I love to do right.
Jonathan Sunderland:My call to action is to help people get people to think about capacity, right, because it's capacity that then gives you the freedom to do other things, and actually that freedom is then intrinsic to agility and survival, and actually it's quite an enjoyable thing, right. It's why, it's why we exercise, it's why we go to school. It's actually to increase our capacity. Capacity is a human trait. It's it's one of the most important human traits. Thank you so much. Thank you, infrid.
